First: Sandra Day O'Connor *[ePub]
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The intimate, inspiring, and authoritative biography of Sandra Day O’Connor, America’s first female Supreme Court justice, drawing on exclusive interviews and first-time access to Justice O’Connor’s archives “She’s a hero for our time, and this is the biography for our time.”—Walter Isaacson Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Named One of the Best Books of the Year by NPR and The Washington Post She was born in 1930 in El Paso and grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. At a time when women were expected to be homemakers, she set her sights on Stanford University. When she graduated near the top of her law school class in 1952, no firm would even interview her. But Sandra Day O’Connor’s story is that of a woman who repeatedly shattered glass ceilings—doing so with a blend of grace, wisdom, humor, understatement, and cowgirl toughness. She became the first ever female majority leader of a state senate. As a judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals, she stood up to corrupt lawyers and humanized the law. When she arrived at the United States Supreme Court, appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, she began a quarter-century tenure on the Court, hearing cases that ultimately shaped American law. Diagnosed with cancer at fifty-eight, and caring for a husband with Alzheimer’s, O’Connor endured every difficulty with grit and poise. Women and men who want to be leaders and be first in their own lives—who want to learn when to walk away and when to stand their ground—will be inspired by O’Connor’s example. This is a remarkably vivid and personal portrait of a woman who loved her family, who believed in serving her country, and who, when she became the most powerful woman in America, built a bridge forward for all women. Praise for First “Cinematic . . . poignant . . . illuminating and eminently readable . . . First gives us a real sense of Sandra Day O’Connor the human being. . . . Thomas gives O’Connor the credit she deserves.”—The Washington Post “[A] fascinating and revelatory biography . . . a richly detailed picture of [O’Connor’s] personal and professional life . . . Evan Thomas’s book is not just a biography of a remarkable woman, but an elegy for a worldview that, in law as well as politics, has disappeared from the nation’s main stages.”—The New York Times Book Review Read more
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Why Must Read First: Sandra Day O'Connor?
While I was reading this book, I saw that author Evan Thomas mentioned Joan Biskupic's biography of Sandra Day O'Connor (titled Sandra Day O'Connor) as a source (one of many sources) while writing the book. I found a copy of that bio, first published in late 2005, and read both books, comparing as I went along. Both writers make an effort to portray O'Connor as more than a Supreme Court Justice, going into her childhood and career before the Supreme Court. Both authors did interview O'Connor, although Biskupic's interviews were conducted as part of her reporting on the Court, while Thomas interviewed O'Connor after her retirement specifically for the biography. Thomas's biography included some sources that Biskupic didn't have access to such as John O'Connor's (Sandra Day O'Connor's husband) unpublished memoir and his diaries. Thomas also discusses O'Connor's life after her retirement, while Biskupic's book ends just as O'Connor is retiring from the Supreme Court. Thomas interviewed many, nearly all, of O'Connor's law clerks from her Supreme Court years, giving a little extra insight into her day to day activities at the Court. Still, I came away thinking that if you had to choose between the two books, you might do better to read Biskupic's than Thomas's. For instance, Biskupic showed how O'Connor had been political well before her rise through the court system -- she had even lobbied Nixon to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court (she endorsed a colleague, but it's easy to believe she thought she herself might also be a good candidate) and had been active in Republican politics since serving on Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign. Biskupic was also more descriptive about William Rehnquist's views on race, leaving the reader with little doubt that he had racist views, while Evan Thomas glosses over the subject with a footnote mentioning rumors of racist behavior. This was relevant to a book about O'Connor because Rehnquist and O'Connor were very close (even romantically close at one point in their college years) and decided almost identically during O'Connor's first years on the Supreme Court, although as time went on, she broke with the conservative bloc more often. The Bush v Gore decision comes across as a shockingly poor judicial decision in both books. Both books are full of interesting inside the court information as well as fascinating analysis of court cases and how they were decided.
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